Afshin Mehin is the Jury Captain for the Core77 Design Awards Commercial Equipment and Robotics categories. The Commercial Equipment category features operational equipment and systems designed for public, commercial, industrial, medical, and scientific use. Examples include machinery, medical instruments and devices, construction tools, transaction kiosks, and weather instruments. The Robotics category features hardware or software products at any scale that incorporate mechanized robots to perform physical tasks or solve problems.

Afshin Mehin enjoys new beginnings, at least where technology is concerned. As the Founder and Lead Designer of San Francisco-based product design and innovation agency Card79, Afshin gets excited about working with R&D or innovation teams within companies – whether large organizations or startups – to help them evolve a nascent technology into the first generation of a new product. "This is the most exciting - when the work is defining a new product category," he explained.

Afshin Mehin, founder and lead designer at Card79

With Card79, Afshin tackles complex and future-facing products from brain-computer interfaces to autonomous vehicles, leveraging the studios industrial design, UX/UI and brand capabilities to help companies like Postmates, Amazon, and Lululemon. He operates seamlessly between old and new, with experience spanning traditional furniture designers, like Barber Osgerby and Terence Conran, all the way to futuristic institutions like M.I.T.'s Media Lab Europe and Elon Musk's Neuralink.In today's design landscape, Afshin contemplates how design "can both embrace its heritage of creating beauty and utility but reframing that to work with the more complex systems that are becoming more valuable." That could include anything from product life cycle analysis to designing with data to the impact of AI on design.

When asked about guidance for Core77 Design Awards entrants, Afshin offers a tweak on a commonly offered piece of advice: the directive to 'fail early, fail often.' He would amend the suggestion to place more emphasis on pattern recognition as part of failure. "The real piece of advice that's often implied with that, but is not emphasized enough, is that every time you fail, try to spot a pattern. Try to use it as a way to reorient," said Afshin. He encourages designers to ask themselves why something went wrong in that instance or in similar instances, making any failure a more valuable learning experience.

Revio is a gene sequencing machine used for human genetic analysis, cancer research, agricultural genomics, and more.

Last year's Core77 Design Awards winner in the Commercial Equipment category was Whipsaw for its Revio Sequencing System, a gene sequencing machine used for human genetic analysis, cancer research, agricultural genomics, and more.

Rapid Robotics created the Rapid Machine Operator (RMO) as an all-in-one robotic automation solution that is affordable and accessible to all major manufacturing sectors.

In the Robotics category, the winner was Card79 for its Rapid Machine Operator (RMO), an intuitive, adaptable robotic system that removes the barriers preventing U.S. manufacturers from using Industrial robotics for small and medium-sized manufacturers.

If you have a commercial equipment or robotics project that marks a new beginning (and maybe a failure or two along the way), submit it to the 2024 Core77 Design Awards.